Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Skydance. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children, it is primarily aimed at children and adolescents aged 2 to 17, along with a broader family audience through its programming blocks.

The channel began as a test broadcast on December 1, 1977, as part of QUBE, an early cable television system broadcast locally in Columbus, Ohio. On April 1, 1979, the channel was renamed Nickelodeon and launched to a new nationwide audience, with Pinwheel as its inaugural program. The network was initially commercial-free and remained without advertising until 1984. Nickelodeon gained a rebranding in programming and image that year, and its ensuing success led to it and its sister networks MTV and VH1 being sold to Viacom in 1985.

Nickelodeon began expanding as a franchise model with the addition of sister channels and program blocks. Nick Jr. launched as preschool morning block on January 4, 1988, and was eventually spun-off into the Nick Jr. Channel in 2009. Nicktoons, based on the flagship brand for Nickelodeon original animated series, launched as a standalone channel in 2002. Noggin, an interactive educational brand created in partnership with Sesame Workshop, existed as a television channel from 1999 to 2009 and a mobile streaming service from 2015 to 2024. Two blocks aimed at teenage audiences, Nickelodeon's TEENick and Noggin's The N, were merged to form the TeenNick channel in 2009.

As of December 2023^[update], Nickelodeon was available to approximately 70 million pay television households in the United States, down from its peak of 101 million households in 2011.

The channel's name comes from the first five-cent movie theaters called nickelodeons. Its history dates back to December 1, 1977, when Warner Cable Communications (later known as Time Warner Cable) launched the first 2-way interactive cable system, QUBE, in Columbus, Ohio. The C-3 cable channel carried Pinwheel daily from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and the channel was labelled "Pinwheel" on remote controllers, as it was the only program broadcast. Initially scheduled for a February 1979 launch, Nickelodeon launched on April 1, 1979, initially distributed to Warner Cable systems via satellite on the RCA Satcom-1 transponder. Originally commercial-free, advertising was introduced in January 1984.

Programming seen on Nickelodeon includes animated series (such as SpongeBob SquarePants, The Loud House, The Patrick Star Show and The Smurfs), live-action, scripted series (such as The Thundermans: Undercover), and original made-for-TV movies, while the network's daytime schedule is dedicated to shows targeting preschoolers (such as Bubble Guppies, Paw Patrol, and Blue's Clues & You!).

A recurring program was bi-monthly special editions of Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, a news magazine series aimed at children that debuted in 1992 as a weekly series and ended in 2015. In June 2020, Nickelodeon announced that they would bring back Nick News in a series of hour-long specials. The first installment, Kids, Race and Unity: A Nick News Special premiered on June 29, 2020, and was hosted by R&B musician Alicia Keys.

Since 2021, Nickelodeon has aired at least one live National Football League game a year, produced by corporate sibling CBS Sports and incorporating elements unique to Nickelodeon into the broadcast such as green slime in the end zone and SpongeBob SquarePants' face superimposed on the netting of the goalposts. Nickelodeon also carries the weekly shoulder program NFL Slimetime during the season which includes similar graphics. Nickelodeon offered the first alternate broadcast of a Super Bowl in 2024 when it aired a SpongeBob SquarePants-themed simulcast of CBS' coverage.